production blog

production crunch report #3 — > leveraging everything…

Set assembly

The first thing that needs to be done is a very simple dummy set, which matches the 2D concept design… It serves as scale reference for all models and is used as a starting point to build up the set.

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my current approach is very similar to real life kitbashing…

create something (a rock, plant or whatever) using whatever method

retopo, UVs, and bake 8K EXR displacement maps for parts or the entire object. (some are resized to 4K when appropriate)

add it to the set, put a simple shader(incl. displacements) on it

instantiate and fill up the set as much as possible (which is pretty much the only advantage “3D” brings to the table compared to painted or photographed backgrounds.. everything else is a lot more work, though)

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soo….when your TODO list exceeds 500.000 items (like this project feels like ;) ) you begin to look for every opportunity and possibility to get something done… so to follow-up on point “1. create something”… these are the methods we usually use to create “stuff”:

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…most models are created manually “new style”..

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(sculpted in ZBrush or 3dCoat, then retopoed (in either ZBrush or 3dCoat), and finalized in Softimage) the following models were sculpted by Florian Stucki and (partially) myself:

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…some are created “old style”…

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(an aubergine modeled by Babette Kahn in Softimage, which will be detailed later in Mudbox)

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..and some are even created using automated photogrammetry….

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(canon 7D, a good jacket, autodesk 123Dcatch, and a lot of patience)

the quality of the (photogrammetry) output varies a lot, but I’ve already processed around 30 models and most of them are quite useable. It’s a nice and cheap way of adding organic detail to the scene.

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the final images (its broken down into several layers for the game engine) are rendered in 10K (wide), so the overall quality/detail level of all models has to be (and I can proudly say “is”) pretty high, (the cube with the 2 spheres on the left side is a frog dummy, in case you are wondering ;) )

at this point I started to test the set inside the game engine….
…. but more about that later…..